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There are nearly 80 million reasons for believing that decisive action on federal debt and deficits should start now. The Census Bureau projects that, by 2040, the number of Americans 65 and older will have climbed to 79.7 million, up from 44.7 million in 2013. That's one measure of the demographic time bomb that will cause an explosion in entitlement spending, which could, in turn, bust the federal budget.

The chart nearby helps explain why the impact of this demographic shock has so far been mild. It tracks the number of Americans 65 and older as a percentage of the number of working-age Americans, 18 to 64. This year, the share is 22.6%, up from 18.7% in 1980. By 2040, it will have soared to 36.6%.

Put more starkly, according to these percentages, there are now 4.4 people of working-age potentially supporting each senior citizen. By 2040, each senior citizen will be potentially supported by just 2.7 working-age individuals. I say "potentially" because we don't know how many 18-to-64-year-olds will actually have paying jobs and thus be directly contributing to government support of the seniors. We do know that, to compensate for the plummeting ratio of the working-aged to seniors, the labor-force participation rate would have to rise to a degree too extreme to be taken seriously.

The aging of America is the key reason the deficit-deniers can't be taken seriously. Those who deny that debt and deficits should be dealt with now point out that budget projections for the next 10 years don't look especially worrisome. But instead of viewing this relatively brief breathing period as an opportunity to prepare, they regard it as an excuse to delay.

Ironically, the Congressional Budget Office, the source the deniers generally use when they cite numbers, is the same agency that has warned of rivers of red ink when elder-care dependency reaches critical mass around the mid-2020s. In its February report on the 10-year outlook through 2023, the CBO declared that "projections for the period covered in this report do not fully reflect long-term budgetary pressures," adding that "debt will rise sharply relatively to GDP after 2023." That's why the agency proposed "deciding now what policy changes to make to resolve that long-term imbalance…."

Concern about the soaring cost of elder care once energized former President Bill Clinton. Since Clinton's presidency is generally admired by the debt-deniers, they might regard his 1999 State of the Union address as required reading. Speaking of "the aging of America," Clinton noted that, "With the number of elderly Americans set to double by 2030, the baby boom will become a senior boom."

To handle this, Clinton proposed doing what any household would deem rationale to save for old age: setting aside looming budget surpluses to shore up Social Security and Medicare, which he recognized weren't on a "sound footing."

The fact that those surpluses turned to deficits only makes Clinton's core message—14 years later--all the more urgent. If surpluses were required in 1999 to deal with the aging of America, then in 2013, the government should at least aim to balance its budget.

A BALANCED BUDGET is what House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan aimed to achieve in his fiscal proposal released last week. It's a sign of the times that even that relatively modest objective wouldn't be realized in the Wisconsin Republican's plan until 2023. And even then, a balanced budget is based on the optimistic assumption that tax revenue will be fueled by annual growth of 3% in real GDP. That would be a welcome return to the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, when yearly economic expansion did run at 3%. But it would be a quantum leap over its performance in the past 10 years, during which it averaged 1.7%.

Ryan would boost spending, but by a slower rate than the growth of current-dollar gross domestic product. Spending's share would run 19.1% by 2023, down from 23.1% this year. Tax revenue, now running at 17% of current-dollar GDP, would slowly rise to match spending.

One reason the Ryan plan looks like a non-starter: It would repeal Obamacare. For more on the political realities, see D.C. Current.